These posts, about J Street conference speakers who advocate anti-
Israel boycotts and sanctions, are becoming an annual tradition. Last
year the ostensibly pro-Israel group hosted BDS advocates from fringe
left-wing Jewish groups, raising questions as to why J Street’s
commitment to “expanding the debate” over Israel only seems to
involve stretching the spectrum to include the anti-Israel side.

This year J Street is hosting the book launch of Peter Beinart who —
will wonders never cease — just published an op-ed in the New York
Times calling for a “Zionist BDS” campaign that would seek to
economically suffocate all Israeli Jews who live beyond the 1948
armistice lines.

(1) In practice — which is to say, outside of Beinart’s singular too-
clever-by-half advocacy — there’s no such thing as a limited anti-
Israel boycott. There isn’t this critical mass of Western activists
waiting to learn from Peter Beinart which Israelis they’re supposed
to like and who they need to ostracize, and takes either shallow
narcissism or revelatory cocooning to believe otherwise. Meanwhile
the Palestinians talk about Israeli chains that “spread like cancer,”
a nice rhetorical reminder that boycott movements get their strength
not just from revulsion but from the cheap superiority to be found in
feeling revulsed. Israel doesn’t actually make all that much in the
West Bank, and the typical attraction of BDS has far more to do with
chasing the never-quite-adequate pleasure of hating those people — of
indulging in an ugly sneer at the thought of rotting Israeli goods
and suffering Israeli families — than with utilizing objective
economic leverage.

That’s why calls for so-called “targeted” BDS routinely metastasize
into calls for total boycotts of the Jewish State. In Britain efforts
to label products from settlements spurred greater efforts for full
boycotts. Partisans inclined to hate Israel hijack not just the
campaigns but also even the physical forums where partial vs. full
BDS gets debated. The consistency with which that dynamic has played
out raises questions about whether limited BDS advocates are merely
naive.

(2) BDS is such a vulgar advocacy that even Norman Finkelstein, who
once made John Mearsheimer’s list of good Jews, can’t stomach it. He
recently lashed out against the “cult” in general, and he was
specifically bothered by the nudge-wink pretense that BDS advocates
can somehow untangle their campaigns from wholesale calls to wipe out
Israel:

Finkelstein got into trouble when he said that some people in
BDS “don’t want Israel.” He lectured his BDS colleagues: “Stop trying
to be so clever, because you’re only clever in your cult. The moment
you step out, you have to deal with Israeli propaganda … They
say, ‘No, they’re not really talking about rights; they’re talking
about they want to destroy Israel.’ And in fact I think they’re
right, I think that’s true.”

In fact, Finkelstein said, it is “not an accident, an unwitting
omission, that BDS does not mention Israel”: They “know it will split
the movement, because there’s a large segment—component—of the
movement that wants to eliminate Israel.” You can see why anti-Israel
people were offended to hear this from Finkelstein, of all people.
Yet Finkelstein was not revealing some deep secret about the motives
of those BDS-ers. Anyone who has listened to their leaders, read
their papers, seen them at play, or checked out their circle of
acquaintances, supporters, and collaborators can hardly be surprised.

It would be great if someone could push Beinart on Finkelstein’s
points, especially on the issue of left-wing BDS disingenuousness.
The odds of that particular conversation happening at the J Street
conference are, for obvious reasons, not particularly great.